They looked like the finger holes in a bowling ball. In them lived crayfish and fresh water mussels. While Ed was photographing the falls, I explored these natural aquariums. I collected several mussel shells because they were so emerald green – not from any algae covering, but from the shell itself. They have since turned white. Shells, even small drab ones like these, are a marvelous study in functional and aesthetic design. Each curved groove of its surface seems like the thumbprint of God. In one hole that was not quite so deep as the others I found a pretty battered mussel shell which I brought home with me

Last week, during my stay in Beckley WV, preacher-geologist-writer-photographer and dear friend, Ed Rehbein, took me hiking to Sandstone Falls on the New River. No one knows the best places to hike in WV like Ed, and since he sees God and beauty in addition to geological formations when he looks at that ancient river he is the perfect guide. The New River was extremely low, and portions of the falls that were normally under several feet of gushing, clear water were now dry and accessible. The dry bed portion of the falls was dotted with holes, some several feet deep, where the shale bed had worn away more quickly. These holes were circular, and less than three feet in diameter. They looked like the finger holes in a bowling ball. In them lived crayfish and fresh water mussels. While Ed was photographing the falls, I explored these natural aquariums. I collected several mussel shells because they were so emerald green – not from any algae covering, but from the shell itself. They have since turned white. Shells, even small drab ones like these, are a marvelous study in functional and aesthetic design. Each curved groove of its surface seems like the thumbprint of God. In one hole that was not quite so deep as the others I found a pretty battered mussel shell which I brought home with me – because it was five inches long! I’ve never picked up a mussel shell more than an inch long. How old did the mussel have to be to get that big? How did it survive in the rapid water of the falls?

The rocks I brought home with me – sandstone and quartz, were silicates, Ed told me. Silicon Dioxide, more precisely. I remembered Bill Nye the Science Guy one time demonstrating the dimensions of an atom by using a silicon atom as an example. He was standing in Death Valley and held up a soccer ball. The soccer ball was supposed to be the nucleus of a silicon atom. “A silicon atom has 14 electrons,” he explained, and in comparison to the soccer ball-sized nucleus, each electron would be smaller than a BB. The relative distance between the soccer ball and the BB would be three hundred yards. Amazing. The visual of a soccer ball in the great emptiness of Death Valley separated from a BB by three football field’s distance made me understand what he meant when he said that inside the electron shell of an atom, there was “a vast region of empty space.” What if between sub-atomic particles there is the same vast emptiness? I also understood now how it could be, as astronomers and cosmologists claim, that there are places where matter is so compressed that the weight of the planet Jupiter could fit in a gym-bag. The hardest mineral, the densest element is made up mostly of space.

What I didn’t understand was how there could be anything solid at all to stand on. If a silicon atom is connected to two oxygen atoms by the fourteen BBs orbiting it 300 yards away, how can that molecule make rocks? Then just yesterday, on one of those science shows that come on PBS at 5 in the morning, I found out that electrons don’t orbit at all. They “diffuse and manifest in specific patterns.” It was described to be like blinking lights on a Christmas tree. If you wrap a string of lights on a Christmas tree with no two lights blinking at the same time the pattern would be fixed, but appear random. If we think of the electron shell of the atom as a sphere, an electron appears at a million points on that sphere as it diffuses, then re-manifests, all in a set pattern. But how? What does “diffuse and manifest” mean – does it sort of liquefy and re-solidify? What keeps an electron at just the right distance from the nucleus? What keeps it on pattern? And, to repeat my previous question: how can this seemingly tenuous fabric of silicon and oxygen atoms make a rock?

There is a great, cosmological passage about Jesus in Colossians 1, where Jesus is seen as the source of all things “visible and invisible” and the force that “holds all things together,” (vv.15-17). This goes beyond what John says about Jesus in John 1.1ff, where Jesus is identified as God’s creative force. The response I used to get to the questions I am still asking was - “because God made it that way.” Why do geese honk? Why do snowflakes look like lace? Why do dogs dream? Because God made them that way. I felt like Dylan Thomas in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” whose gift book told him “everything about the wasp, but why.” Paul says something more. Paul in Colossians1.15-17 doesn’t just claim that God, through Jesus, made it that way, but that he is making it that way still: in him all things hold together. Paul makes the same point on the Aeropagus in Acts 17.28. Quoting the poet Epimenedes, he says that in him “we live, and move, and exist.”

We speak of God as omnipresent, and rightfully so –he is (Psalm 139). That presence means more than that he is just in the room – the way I may be present. It means he is present at the sub-atomic level, that he permeates every atom, that the universe works not just because of his design, but by His continued presence. My heart beats because God makes it so. The alveoli in my lungs absorb oxygen into my bloodstream because God is present. The electron shell of the oxygen atom is just where it is supposed to be because God keeps it there.

As David says (Psalm 139.14), we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” We are fearfully and wonderfully maintained as well.